Medical schools across the country have resisted efforts to dismantle their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs despite President Donald Trump's executive order to end them, Ian Kingsbury, director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine at Do No Harm, told Newsmax on Thursday.
Research by Do No Harm found that 28 of 154 U.S. medical schools failed a test comparing their commitment to academic merit against DEI initiatives.
Kingsbury said many institutions have ignored or evaded Trump's directive. The order directed universities and medical schools receiving federal funding to end DEI offices and practices.
"These medical schools — just like other colleges and universities — were supposed to scrap their DEI programs following that executive order from President Trump," Kingsbury told "Finnerty."
"But what we've seen is that there's been an enormous amount of defiance, and many of these schools are still maintaining an office that they call diversity, equity, or inclusion. In other cases, they've renamed it — they call it something like inclusive excellence — but it's the same exact staff members performing the same activities."
The persistence of DEI in admissions and hiring, Kingsbury said, prioritizes race over merit in ways that could undermine medical quality. He criticized the notion of "racial concordance" — the idea that physicians of the same racial background are best suited to serve patients.
"They've come up with this crazy idea that somehow this is beneficial for patients or something that's really needed within the healthcare field," he said.
"It's an idea that has absolutely no merit. The consequence is that schools continue racially conscious admissions systems, and merit is taking a back seat."
Asked whether this approach has cost lives, Kingsbury said that could be a "natural and logical conclusion."
"There's a lot of evidence showing that aptitude matters when it comes to performance in medical school, and performance in medical school is predictive of performance in residency," he said.
"These exams exist for a reason. Historically, there's good evidence for centering aptitude and merit when it comes to medical school admissions."
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